Instacart Launches White-Label AI Assistant for Retailers

Instacart's Cart Assistant lets any retailer embed a custom shopping agent on its own site, while a separate consumer assistant, Clementine, will start carrying ads by the end of the year. CCO Ryan Hamburger said Instacart is deliberately "not sharing the same level of data with OpenAI as we would with the shopping assistant embedded on our platform," keeping retail data a competitive moat, with advertising GM Ali Miller saying the company is "purposefully going slowly" before layering ads into the assistants.